Monthly Archives: June 2018

Smart paint that ‘talks’ to canes for better safety crossing the street

It would be nice if they had some video of people navigating with the help of this ‘smart’ paint. Perhaps one day. Meanwhile, Adele Peters in her March 7, 2018 article for Fast Company provides a vivid description of how a sight-impaired or blind person could navigate more safely and easily,

The crosswalk on a road in front of the Ohio State School for the Blind looks like one that might be found at any intersection. But the white stripes at the edges are made with “smart paint”–and if a student who is visually impaired crosses while using a cane with a new smart tip, the cane will vibrate when it touches the lines.

The paint uses rare-earth nanocrystals that can emit a unique light signature, which a sensor added to the tip of a cane can activate and then read. “If you pulse a laser or LED into these materials, they’ll pulse back at you at a very specific frequency,” says Josh Collins, chief technology officer at Intelligent Materials [sic], the company that manufacturers the oxides that can be added to paint.

While digging down for more information, this February 12, 2018 article by Ben Levine for Government Technology Magazine was unearthed (Note: Links have been removed),

In this installment of the Innovation of the Month series (read last month’s story here), we explore the use of smart technologies to help blind and visually impaired people better navigate the world around them. A team at Ohio State University has been working on a “smart paint” application to do just that.

MetroLab’s Executive Director Ben Levine sat down with John Lannutti, professor of materials science engineering at Ohio State University; Mary Ball-Swartwout, orientation and mobility specialist at the Ohio State School for the Blind; and Josh Collins, chief technology officer at Intelligent Material to learn more.

John Lannutti (OSU): The goal of “smart paint for networked smart cities” is to assist people who are blind and visually impaired by implementing a “smart paint” technology that provides accurate location services. You might think, “Can’t GPS do that?” But, surprisingly, current GPS-based solutions actually cannot tell whether somebody is walking on the sidewalk or down the middle of the street. Meanwhile, modern urban intersections are becoming increasingly complex. That means that finding a crosswalk, aligning to cross and maintaining a consistent crossing direction while in motion can be challenging for people who are visually impaired.

And of course, crosswalks aren’t the only challenge. For example, our current mapping technologies are unable to provide the exact location of a building’s entrance. We have a technology solution to those challenges. Smart paint is created by adding exotic light-converting oxides to standard road paints. The paint is detected using a “smart cane,” a modified white cane that detects the smart paint and enables portal-to-portal guidance. The smart cane can also be used to notify vehicles — including autonomous vehicles — of a user’s presence in a crosswalk.

As part of this project, we have a whole team of educational, city and industrial partners, including:

Educational partners: 

  • Ohio State School for the Blind — testing and implementation of smart paint technology in Columbus involving both students and adults
  • Western Michigan University — implementation of smart paint technology with travelers who are blind and visually impaired to maximize orientation and mobility
  • Mississippi State University — the impacts of smart paint technology on mobility and employment for people who are blind and visually impaired

City partners:  

  • Columbus Smart Cities Initiative — rollout of smart paint within Columbus and the paint’s interaction with the Integrated Data Exchange (IDE), a cloud-based platform that dynamically collects user data to show technological impact
  • The city of Tampa, Fla. — rollout of smart paint at the Lighthouse for the Blind
  • The Hillsborough Area Transit Regional Authority, Hillsborough County, Fla. — integration of smart paint with existing bus lines to enable precise location determination
  • The American Council of the Blind — implementation of smart paint with the annual American Council of the Blind convention
  • MetroLab Network — smart paint implementation in city-university partnerships

Industrial collaborators:  

  • Intelligent Material — manufactures and supplies the unique light-converting oxides that make the paint “smart”
  • Crown Technology — paint manufacturing, product evaluation and technical support
  • SRI International — design and manufacturing of the “smart” white cane hardware

Levine: Can you describe what this project focused on and what motivated you to address this particular challenge?

Lannutti: We have been working with Intelligent Material in integrating light-converting oxides into polymeric matrices for specific applications for several years. Intelligent Material supplies these oxides for highly specialized applications across a variety of industries, and has deep experience in filtering and processing the resulting optical outputs. They were already looking at using this technology for automotive applications when the idea to develop applications for people who are blind was introduced. We were extremely fortunate to have the Ohio State School for the Blind (OSSB) right here in Columbus and even more fortunate to have interested collaborators there who have helped us at every step of the way. They even have a room filled with previous white cane technologies; we used those to better understand what works and what doesn’t, helping refine our own product. At about this same time, the National Science Foundation released a call for Smart and Connected Communities proposals, which gave us both a goal and a “home” for this idea.

Levine: How will the tools developed in this project impact planning and the built environment?

Ball-Swartwout: One of the great things about smart paint is that it can be added to the built environment easily at little extra cost. We expect that once smart paint is widely adopted, most sighted users will not notice much difference as smart paint is not visually different from regular road paint. Some intersections might need to have more paint features that enable smart white cane-guided entry from the sidewalk into the crosswalk. Paint that tells users that they have reached their destination may become visible as horizontal stripes along modern sidewalks. These paints could be either gray or black or even invisible to sighted pedestrians, but would still be detectable by “smart” white canes to tell users that they have arrived at their destination.

Levine: Can you tell us about the new technologies that are associated with this project? Can you talk about the status quo versus your vision for the future?

Collins: Beyond converting ceramics in paint, placing a highly sensitive excitation source and detector package at the tip of a moving white cane is truly novel. Also challenging is powering this package using minimal battery weight to decrease the likelihood of wrist and upper neck fatigue.

The status quo is that the travel of citizens who are blind and visually impaired can be unpredictable. They need better technologies for routine travel and especially for travel to any new destinations. In addition, we anticipate that this technology could assist in the travel of people who have a variety of physical and cognitive impairments.

Our vision for the future of this technology is that it will be widespread and utilized constantly. Outside the U.S., Japan and Europe have integrated relatively expensive technologies into streets and sidewalks, and we see smart paint replacing that very quickly. Because the “pain” of installing smart paint is very small, we believe that grass-roots pressure will enable rapid introduction of this technology.

Levine: What was the most surprising thing you learned during this process?

Lannutti: In my mind, the most surprising thing was discovering that sound was not necessarily the best means of guiding users who are blind. This is a bias on the part of sighted individuals as we are used to beeping and buzzing noises that guide or inform us throughout our day. Pedestrians who are blind, on the other hand, need to constantly listen to aspects of their environment to successfully navigate it. For example, listening to traffic noise is extremely important to them as a means of avoiding danger. People who are blind or visually impaired cannot see but need to hear their environment. So we had to dial back our expectations regarding the utility of sound. Instead, we now focus on vibration along the white cane as a means of alerting the user.

If those interested, Levine’s article is well worth reading in its entirety.

Thankfully they’ve added some information to the website for Intelligent Material (Solutions) since I first viewed it.

There’s a bit more information on the Intelligent Material (Solutions’) YouTube video webpage,

Intelligent Material Solutions, Inc. is a privately held business headquartered in Princeton, NJ in the SRI/Sarnoff Campus, formerly RCA Labs. Our technology can be traced through scientific discoveries dating back over 50 years. We are dedicated to solving the worlds’ most challenging problems and in doing so have assembled an innovative, multi-discipliary team of leading scientists from industry and academia to ensure rapid transition from our labs to the world.

The video was published on December 6, 2017. You can find even more details at the company’s LinkedIn page.

AI x 2: the Amnesty International and Artificial Intelligence story

Amnesty International and artificial intelligence seem like an unexpected combination but it all makes sense when you read a June 13, 2018 article by Steven Melendez for Fast Company (Note: Links have been removed),

If companies working on artificial intelligence don’t take steps to safeguard human rights, “nightmare scenarios” could unfold, warns Rasha Abdul Rahim, an arms control and artificial intelligence researcher at Amnesty International in a blog post. Those scenarios could involve armed, autonomous systems choosing military targets with little human oversight, or discrimination caused by biased algorithms, she warns.

Rahim pointed at recent reports of Google’s involvement in the Pentagon’s Project Maven, which involves harnessing AI image recognition technology to rapidly process photos taken by drones. Google recently unveiled new AI ethics policies and has said it won’t continue with the project once its current contract expires next year after high-profile employee dissent over the project. …

“Compliance with the laws of war requires human judgement [sic] –the ability to analyze the intentions behind actions and make complex decisions about the proportionality or necessity of an attack,” Rahim writes. “Machines and algorithms cannot recreate these human skills, and nor can they negotiate, produce empathy, or respond to unpredictable situations. In light of these risks, Amnesty International and its partners in the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots are calling for a total ban on the development, deployment, and use of fully autonomous weapon systems.”

Rasha Abdul Rahim’s June 14, 2018 posting (I’m putting the discrepancy in publication dates down to timezone differences) on the Amnesty International website (Note: Links have been removed),

Last week [June 7, 2018] Google released a set of principles to govern its development of AI technologies. They include a broad commitment not to design or deploy AI in weaponry, and come in the wake of the company’s announcement that it will not renew its existing contract for Project Maven, the US Department of Defense’s AI initiative, when it expires in 2019.

The fact that Google maintains its existing Project Maven contract for now raises an important question. Does Google consider that continuing to provide AI technology to the US government’s drone programme is in line with its new principles? Project Maven is a litmus test that allows us to see what Google’s new principles mean in practice.

As details of the US drone programme are shrouded in secrecy, it is unclear precisely what role Google plays in Project Maven. What we do know is that US drone programme, under successive administrations, has been beset by credible allegations of unlawful killings and civilian casualties. The cooperation of Google, in any capacity, is extremely troubling and could potentially implicate it in unlawful strikes.

As AI technology advances, the question of who will be held accountable for associated human rights abuses is becoming increasingly urgent. Machine learning, and AI more broadly, impact a range of human rights including privacy, freedom of expression and the right to life. It is partly in the hands of companies like Google to safeguard these rights in relation to their operations – for us and for future generations. If they don’t, some nightmare scenarios could unfold.

Warfare has already changed dramatically in recent years – a couple of decades ago the idea of remote controlled bomber planes would have seemed like science fiction. While the drones currently in use are still controlled by humans, China, France, Israel, Russia, South Korea, the UK and the US are all known to be developing military robots which are getting smaller and more autonomous.

For example, the UK is developing a number of autonomous systems, including the BAE [Systems] Taranis, an unmanned combat aircraft system which can fly in autonomous mode and automatically identify a target within a programmed area. Kalashnikov, the Russian arms manufacturer, is developing a fully automated, high-calibre gun that uses artificial neural networks to choose targets. The US Army Research Laboratory in Maryland, in collaboration with BAE Systems and several academic institutions, has been developing micro drones which weigh less than 30 grams, as well as pocket-sized robots that can hop or crawl.

Of course, it’s not just in conflict zones that AI is threatening human rights. Machine learning is already being used by governments in a wide range of contexts that directly impact people’s lives, including policing [emphasis mine], welfare systems, criminal justice and healthcare. Some US courts use algorithms to predict future behaviour of defendants and determine their sentence lengths accordingly. The potential for this approach to reinforce power structures, discrimination or inequalities is huge.

In july 2017, the Vancouver Police Department announced its use of predictive policing software, the first such jurisdiction in Canada to make use of the technology. My Nov. 23, 2017 posting featured the announcement.

The almost too aptly named Campaign to Stop Killer Robots can be found here. Their About Us page provides a brief history,

Formed by the following non-governmental organizations (NGOs) at a meeting in New York on 19 October 2012 and launched in London in April 2013, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is an international coalition working to preemptively ban fully autonomous weapons. See the Chronology charting our major actions and achievements to date.

Steering Committee

The Steering Committee is the campaign’s principal leadership and decision-making body. It is comprised of five international NGOs, a regional NGO network, and four national NGOs that work internationally:

Human Rights Watch
Article 36
Association for Aid and Relief Japan
International Committee for Robot Arms Control
Mines Action Canada
Nobel Women’s Initiative
PAX (formerly known as IKV Pax Christi)
Pugwash Conferences on Science & World Affairs
Seguridad Humana en América Latina y el Caribe (SEHLAC)
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

For more information, see this Overview. A Terms of Reference is also available on request, detailing the committee’s selection process, mandate, decision-making, meetings and communication, and expected commitments.

For anyone who may be interested in joining Amnesty International, go here.

Soft things for your brain

A March 5, 2018 news item on Nanowerk describes the latest stretchable electrode (Note: A link has been removed),

Klas Tybrandt, principal investigator at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics at Linköping University [Sweden], has developed new technology for long-term stable neural recording. It is based on a novel elastic material composite, which is biocompatible and retains high electrical conductivity even when stretched to double its original length.

The result has been achieved in collaboration with colleagues in Zürich and New York. The breakthrough, which is crucial for many applications in biomedical engineering, is described in an article published in the prestigious scientific journal Advanced Materials (“High-Density Stretchable Electrode Grids for Chronic Neural Recording”).

A March 5, 2018 Linköping University press release, which originated the news item, gives more detail but does not mention that the nanowires are composed of titanium dioxide (you can find additional details in the abstract for the paper; link and citation will be provided later in this posting)),

The coupling between electronic components and nerve cells is crucial not only to collect information about cell signalling, but also to diagnose and treat neurological disorders and diseases, such as epilepsy.

It is very challenging to achieve long-term stable connections that do not damage neurons or tissue, since the two systems, the soft and elastic tissue of the body and the hard and rigid electronic components, have completely different mechanical properties.

Stretchable soft electrodeThe soft electrode stretched to twice its length Photo credit: Thor Balkhed

“As human tissue is elastic and mobile, damage and inflammation arise at the interface with rigid electronic components. It not only causes damage to tissue; it also attenuates neural signals,” says Klas Tybrandt, leader of the Soft Electronics group at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Linköping University, Campus Norrköping.

New conductive material

Klas Tybrandt has developed a new conductive material that is as soft as human tissue and can be stretched to twice its length. The material consists of gold coated titanium dioxide nanowires, embedded into silicone rubber. The material is biocompatible – which means it can be in contact with the body without adverse effects – and its conductivity remains stable over time.

“The microfabrication of soft electrically conductive composites involves several challenges. We have developed a process to manufacture small electrodes that also preserves the biocompatibility of the materials. The process uses very little material, and this means that we can work with a relatively expensive material such as gold, without the cost becoming prohibitive,” says Klas Tybrandt.

The electrodes are 50 µm [microns or micrometres] in size and are located at a distance of 200 µm from each other. The fabrication procedure allows 32 electrodes to be placed onto a very small surface. The final probe, shown in the photograph, has a width of 3.2 mm and a thickness of 80 µm.

The soft microelectrodes have been developed at Linköping University and ETH Zürich, and researchers at New York University and Columbia University have subsequently implanted them in the brain of rats. The researchers were able to collect high-quality neural signals from the freely moving rats for 3 months. The experiments have been subject to ethical review, and have followed the strict regulations that govern animal experiments.

Important future applications

Klas Tybrandt, researcher at Laboratory for Organic ElectronicsKlas Tybrandt, researcher at Laboratory for Organic Electronics Photo credit: Thor Balkhed

“When the neurons in the brain transmit signals, a voltage is formed that the electrodes detect and transmit onwards through a tiny amplifier. We can also see which electrodes the signals came from, which means that we can estimate the location in the brain where the signals originated. This type of spatiotemporal information is important for future applications. We hope to be able to see, for example, where the signal that causes an epileptic seizure starts, a prerequisite for treating it. Another area of application is brain-machine interfaces, by which future technology and prostheses can be controlled with the aid of neural signals. There are also many interesting applications involving the peripheral nervous system in the body and the way it regulates various organs,” says Klas Tybrandt.

The breakthrough is the foundation of the research area Soft Electronics, currently being established at Linköping University, with Klas Tybrandt as principal investigator.
liu.se/soft-electronics

A video has been made available (Note: For those who find any notion of animal testing disturbing; don’t watch the video even though it is an animation and does not feature live animals),

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

High-Density Stretchable Electrode Grids for Chronic Neural Recording by Klas Tybrandt, Dion Khodagholy, Bernd Dielacher, Flurin Stauffer, Aline F. Renz, György Buzsáki, and János Vörös. Advanced Materials 2018. DOI: 10.1002/adma.201706520
 First published 28 February 2018

This paper is open access.

Seeing into silicon nanoparticles with ‘mining’ hardware

This was not the mining hardware I expected and it enters the picture after this paragraph which has been excerpted from a February 28, 2018 news item on Nanowerk,

For the first time, researchers developed a three-dimensional dynamic model of an interaction between light and nanoparticles. They used a supercomputer with graphic accelerators for calculations. Results showed that silicon particles exposed to short intense laser pulses lose their symmetry temporarily. Their optical properties become strongly heterogeneous. Such a change in properties depends on particle size, therefore it can be used for light control in ultrafast information processing nanoscale devices. …

A March 2, 2018 ITMO University (Russia) press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more detail and a mention of ‘cryptocurrency mining’ hardware,

Improvement of computing devices today focuses on increasing information processing speeds. Nanophotonics is one of the sciences that can solve this problem by means of optical devices. Although optical signals can be transmitted and processed much faster than electronic ones, first, it is necessary to learn how to quickly control light on a small scale. For this purpose, one could use metal particles. They are efficient at localizing light, but weaken the signal, causing significant losses. However, dielectric and semiconducting materials, such as silicon, can be used instead of metal.

Silicon nanoparticles are now actively studied by researchers all around the world, including those at ITMO University. The long-term goal of such studies is to create ultrafast, compact optical signal modulators. They can serve as a basis for computers of the future. However, this technology will become feasible only once we understand how nanoparticles interact with light.

Silicon nanoparticles
Silicon nanoparticles

“When a laser pulse hits the particle, a lot of free electrons are formed inside,” explains Sergey Makarov, head of ITMO’s Laboratory of Hybrid Nanophotonics and Optoelectronics. “A region saturated with oppositely charged particles is created. It is usually called electron-hole plasma. Plasma changes optical properties of particles and, up until today, it was believed that it spreads over the whole particle simultaneously, so that the particle’s symmetry is preserved. We demonstrated that this is not entirely true and an even distribution of plasma inside particles is not the only possible scenario.”

Scientists found that the electromagnetic field caused by an interaction between light and particles has a more complex structure. This leads to a light distortion which varies with time. Therefore, the symmetry of particles is disturbed and optical properties become different throughout one particle.

“Using analytical and numerical methods, we were the first to look inside the particle and we proved that the processes taking place there are far more complicated than we thought,” says Konstantin Ladutenko, staff member of ITMO’s International Research Center of Nanophotonics and Metamaterials.  “Moreover, we found that by changing the particle size, we can affect its interaction with the light signal. This means we might be able to predict the signal path in an entire system of nanoparticles.”

In order to create a tool to study processes inside nanoparticles, scientists from ITMO University joined forces with colleagues from Jean Monnet University in France.

Sergey Makarov
Sergey Makarov

We developed analytical methods to determine the size range of the particles and their refractive index which would make a change in optical properties likely. Afterwards, we used powerful computational methods to monitor processes inside particles. Our colleagues performed calculations on a computer with graphics accelerators. Such computers are often used for cryptocurrency mining [emphasis mine]. However, we decided to enrich humanity with new knowledge, rather than enrich ourselves. Besides, bitcoin rate had just started to go down then,” adds Konstantin.

Devices based on these nanoparticles may become basic elements of optical computers, just as transistors are basic elements of electronics today. They will make it possible to distribute and redirect or branch the signal.

“Such asymmetric structures have a variety of applications, but we are focusing on ultra-fast signal processing,” continues Sergey.We now have a powerful theoretical tool which will help us develop light management systems that will operate on a small scale – in terms of both time and space”.

Here’s a little more about ITMO University from its Wikipedia entry (Note: Links have been removed),

ITMO University (Russian: Университет ИТМО) is a large state university in Saint Petersburg and is one of Russia’s National Research Universities.[1] ITMO University is one of 15 Russian universities that were selected to participate in Russian Academic Excellence Project 5-100[2] by the government of the Russian Federation to improve their international competitiveness among the world’s leading research and educational centers.[3]

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Photogenerated Free Carrier-Induced Symmetry Breaking in Spherical Silicon Nanoparticle by Anton Rudenko, Konstantin Ladutenko, Sergey Makarov, and Tatiana E. Itina.Advanced Optical Materials Vol. 6 Issue 5 DOI: 10.1002/adom.201701153 Version of Record online: 29 JAN 2018

© 2018 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

This paper is behind a paywall.

Having a blast with aluminum nanoparticles

A June 11, 2018 news item on Nanowerk announces ‘explosive’ research from the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL),

Army scientists proved a decades-old prediction that mixing TNT and novel aluminum nanoparticles can significantly enhance energetic performance. This explosive discovery is expected to extend the reach of U.S. Army firepower in battle.

Researchers from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and Texas Tech University demonstrated up to 30-percent enhancement in the detonation velocity of the explosive TNT by adding novel aluminum nanoparticles in which the native alumina shell has been replaced with an oxidizing salt called AIH, or aluminum iodate hexahydrate.

A June 7, 2018 ARL news release (published on EurekAlert on June 11, 2018), which originated the news item, provides more detail,

The structure of the AIH-coated aluminum nanoparticles was revealed for the very first time through high resolution transmission electron (TEM) microscopy performed by ARL’s Dr. Chi-Chin Wu, a materials researcher who leads the plasma research for the lab’s Energetic Materials Science Branch in the Lethality Division [emphasis mine] of Weapons and Materials Research Directorate.

Wu said this revolutionary research offers the potential for the exploitation of aluminum and potentially other metallic nanoparticles in explosive formulations to extend the range and destructive power of Army weapons systems, a key objective of the Army’s “Long Range Precision Fires” modernization priority.

“We believe these results show tremendous promise for enhancing the detonation performance of conventional military explosives with aluminum nanoparticles for the first time,” said ARL’s Dr. Jennifer Gottfried, a physical chemist who collaborated on the research.

“It is very exciting to advance science to a point where we can harness more chemical energy from metal particles at faster timescales. This is an exciting time for transforming energy generation technology,” said Dr. Michelle L. Pantoya, the J. W. Wright Regents Chair in Mechanical Engineering and Professor at Texas Tech University.

The team found that the crystalline aluminum core was effectively protected against unwanted oxidation by the AIH shell, which appears as protruding nodules on the aluminum surface. The enhanced reactivity due to this unique morphological feature and novel core-shell structure was demonstrated by laser-induced air shock from energetic materials experiments, an innovative laboratory-scale energetic testing method developed by Gottfried. This technique involves impacting the sample with a high-energy, focused laser pulse to violently break apart the explosive molecules. The interaction of the laser with the material forms a laser-induced plasma and produces a shock wave that expands into the surrounding air. The energy released from an explosive sample can then be experimentally determined by measuring the laser-induced shock velocity with a high-speed camera.

It was predicted decades ago that aluminum nanoparticles have the potential to enhance the energetic performance of explosives and propellants because of their high energy content and potential for rapid burning. This is because they have exceptionally large surface areas compared to their total volume and a very large heat of reaction. However, the surface of the aluminum nanoparticles is naturally oxidized in air to form a thick alumina shell, typically 20% by weight, which not only lowers the energy content of the nanoparticles by reducing the amount of active aluminum, it also slows the rate of energy release because it acts as a barrier to the reaction of the aluminum with the explosive. Therefore, replacing the oxide shell, as successfully achieved by TTU, can significantly improve the explosive performance.

These preliminary joint efforts have also led to a formal research collaboration under an ARL Director’s Research Award, the fiscal 2018 External Collaboration Initiative between Wu and TTU.

After publishing two papers in high-impact scientific journals in the past year, the team is poised to pursue additional energetics research with aluminum nanoparticles by working with the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command at Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey, and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

A ‘lethality division’, eh?

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Improving the Explosive Performance of Aluminum Nanoparticles with Aluminum Iodate Hexahydrate (AIH) by Jennifer L. Gottfried, Dylan K. Smith, Chi-Chin Wu, & Michelle L. Pantoya. Scientific Reports volume 8, Article number: 8036 (2018) DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-26390-9 Published online May 23, 2018

This paper is open access.

University of Waterloo (Canada) team combines wearable tech with artificial intelligence (AI) for health

A May 16, 2018 University of Waterloo news release (also on EurekAlert) trumpets the research,

A team of Waterloo researchers found that applying artificial intelligence to the right combination of data retrieved from wearable technology may detect whether your health is failing.

The study, which involved researchers from Waterloo’s Faculties of Applied Health Sciences and Engineering, found that the data from wearable sensors and artificial intelligence that assesses changes in aerobic responses could one day predict whether a person is experiencing the onset of a respiratory or cardiovascular disease.

“The onset of a lot of chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, has a direct impact on our aerobic fitness,” said Thomas Beltrame, who led the research while at the University of Waterloo, and is now at the Institute of Computing in University of Campinas in Brazil. “In the near future, we believe it will be possible to continuously check your health, even before you realize that you need medical help.”

The study monitored active, healthy men in their twenties who wore a shirt for four days that incorporated sensors for heart rate, breathing and acceleration. They then compared the readings with laboratory responses and found that it was possible to accurately predict health-related benchmarks during daily activities using only the smart shirt.

“The research found a way to process biological signals and generate a meaningful single number to track fitness,” said Richard Hughson, co-author and kinesiology professor at the Schlegel-University of Waterloo Research Institute for Aging.

Beltrame and Hughson co-authored the study with Alexander Wong, Canada Research Chair in artificial intelligence and medical imaging and an engineering professor at Waterloo. He is affiliated with both the Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute and the Schlegel-University of Waterloo Research Institute for Aging. Robert Amelard, of the Schlegel-University of Waterloo Research Institute for Aging, is also a co-author. The study appears in the Journal of Applied Physiology.

“This multi-disciplinary research is a great example of how artificial intelligence can be a potential game-changer for healthcare by turning data into predictive knowledge to help healthcare professionals better understand an individual’s health,” said Wong. “It can have a significant impact on improving quality of life and well-being.”

Carré Technologies developed the smart shirts, called Hexoskin, used in the research.

The team plans to test these systems on mixed ages and genders, and people with health issues to see how people might wear the sensors to gauge whether their health is failing.

I wonder if this is the 2nd try for publicity about this work. Take a look at the publication date,

Extracting aerobic system dynamics during unsupervised activities of daily living using wearable sensor machine learning models by Thomas Beltrame, Robert Amelard, Alexander Wong, and Richard L. Hughson. Journal of Applied Physiology 124 (2)
Volume 124Issue 2February 2018Pages 473-48 https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.00299.2017 [Published] 23 Feb 2018

This paper is behind a paywall.

Interested parties can find Carré Technologies here.

World’s first ever graphene-enhanced sports shoes/sneakers/running shoes/runners/trainers

Regardless of what these shoes are called, they contain, apparently, some graphene. As to why you as a consumer might find that important, here’s more from a June 20, 2018 news item on Nanowerk,

The world’s first-ever sports shoes to utilise graphene – the strongest material on the planet – have been unveiled by The University of Manchester and British brand inov-8.

Collaborating with graphene experts at National Graphene Institute, the brand has been able to develop a graphene-enhanced rubber. They have developed rubber outsoles for running and fitness shoes that in testing have outlasted 1,000 miles and are scientifically proven to be 50% harder wearing.

The National Graphene Institute (located at the UK’s University of Manchester) June 20, 2018 press release, which originated the news item, provides a few details, none of them particularly technical or scientific, no mention of studies, etc.  (Note: Links have been removed),

Graphene is 200 times stronger than steel and at only a single atom thick it is the thinnest possible material, meaning it has many unique properties. inov-8 is the first brand in the world to use the superlative material in sports footwear, with its G-SERIES shoes available to pre-order from June 22nd [2018] ahead of going on sale from July 12th [2018].

The company first announced its intent to revolutionise the sports footwear industry in December last year. Six months of frenzied anticipation later, inov-8 has now removed all secrecy and let the world see these game-changing shoes.

Michael Price, inov-8 product and marketing director, said: “Over the last 18 months we have worked with the National Graphene Institute at The University of Manchester to bring the world’s toughest grip to the sports footwear market.

“Prior to this innovation, off-road runners and fitness athletes had to choose between a sticky rubber that works well in wet or sweaty conditions but wears down quicker and a harder rubber that is more durable but not quite as grippy. Through intensive research, hundreds of prototypes and thousands of hours of testing in both the field and laboratory, athletes now no longer need to compromise.”

Dr Aravind Vijayaraghavan, Reader in Nanomaterials at The University of Manchester, said: “Using graphene we have developed G-SERIES outsole rubbers that are scientifically tested to be 50% stronger, 50% more elastic and 50% harder wearing.

“We are delighted to put graphene on the shelves of 250 retail stores all over the world and make it accessible to everyone. Graphene is a versatile material with limitless potential and in coming years we expect to deliver graphene technologies in composites, coatings and sensors, many of which will further revolutionise sports products.”

The G-SERIES range is made up of three different shoes, each meticulously designed to meet the needs of athletes. THE MUDCLAW G 260 is for running over muddy mountains and obstacle courses, the TERRAULTRA G 260 for running long distances on hard-packed trails and the F-LITE G 290 for crossfitters working out in gyms. Each includes graphene-enhanced rubber outsoles and Kevlar – a material used in bulletproof vests – on the uppers.

Commenting on the patent-pending technology and the collaboration with The University of Manchester, inov-8 CEO Ian Bailey said: “This powerhouse forged in Northern England is going to take the world of sports footwear by storm. We’re combining science and innovation together with entrepreneurial speed and agility to go up against the major sports brands – and we’re going to win.

“We are at the forefront of a graphene sports footwear revolution and we’re not stopping at just rubber outsoles. This is a four-year innovation project which will see us incorporate graphene into 50% of our range and give us the potential to halve the weight of running/fitness shoes without compromising on performance or durability.”

Graphene is produced from graphite, which was first mined in the Lake District fells of Northern England more than 450 years ago. inov-8 too was forged in the same fells, albeit much more recently in 2003. The brand now trades in 68 countries worldwide.

The scientists who first isolated graphene from graphite were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010. Building on their revolutionary work, a team of over 300 staff at The University of Manchester has pioneered projects into graphene-enhanced prototypes, from sports cars and medical devices to aeroplanes. Now the University can add graphene-enhanced sports footwear to its list of world-firsts.

A picture of the ‘shoes’ has been provided,

Courtesy: National Graphene Institute at University of Manchester

You can find the company inov-8 here. As for more information about their graphene-enhanced show, there’s this,from the company’s ‘graphene webpage‘,

1555Graphite was first mined in the Lake District fells of Northern England

2004Scientists at The University of Manchester isolate graphene from graphite.

2010The Nobel Prize is awarded to the scientists for their ground-breaking experiments with graphene.

2018inov-8 launch the first-ever sports footwear to utilise graphene, delivering the world’s toughest grip.

Ground-breaking technology

One atom thick carbon sheet

200 x stronger than steel

Thin, light, flexible, with limitless potential

inov-8 COLLABORATION WITH THE NATIONAL GRAPHENE INSTITUTE

Previously athletes had to choose between a sticky rubber that works well in wet or sweaty conditions but wears down quicker, and a harder rubber that is more durable but not quite as grippy. Through intensive research, hundreds of prototypes and thousands of hours of testing in both the field and laboratory, athletes now no longer need to compromise. The new rubber we have developed with the National Graphene Institute at The University of Manchester allows us to smash the limits of grip [sic]

The G-SERIES range is made up of three different shoes, each meticulously designed to meet the needs of athletes. Each includes graphene-enhanced rubber outsoles that deliver the world’s toughest grip and Kevlar – a material used in bulletproof vests – on the uppers.

Bulletproof material for running shoes?

As for Canadians eager to try out these shoes, you will likely have to go online or go to the US.  Given how recently (June 19, 2018) this occurred, I’m mentioning the US president’s (Donald Trump) comments that Canadians are notorious for buying shoes in the US and smuggling them across the border back into Canada. (Revelatory information for Canadians everywhere.) His bizarre comments occasioned this explanatory June 19, 2018 article by Jordan Weissmann for Slate.com,

During a characteristically rambling address before the National Federation of Independent Businesses on Tuesday [June 19, 2018], Donald Trump darted off into an odd tangent in which he suggested that Canadians were smuggling shoes across the U.S. border in order to avoid their country’s high tariffs.

There was a story two days ago in a major newspaper talking about people living in Canada coming into the United States and smuggling things back into Canada because the tariffs are so massive. The tariffs to get common items back into Canada are so high that they have to smuggle ‘em in. They buy shoes, then they wear ‘em. They scuff ‘em up. They make ‘em sound old or look old. No, we’re treated horribly. [emphasis mine]

Anyone engaged in this alleged practice would be avoiding payment to the Canadian government. How this constitutes poor treatment of the US government and/or US retailers is a bit a of puzzler.

Getting back to Weissman and his article, he focuses on the source of the US president’s ‘information’.

As for graphene-enhanced ‘shoes’, I hope they are as advertized.

Canada’s National Institute of Nanotechnology and cellphone breathalyzers

First a soap opera, of sorts and then the science.

Canada’s ‘morphing’ National Institute of Nanotechnology

It seems we in Canada no longer have a National Institute of Nanotechnology (NINT) as such. (sigh) The NINT been downsized and rebranded. Always part of Canada’s National Research Council (NRC), the NINT has been languishing for a number of years. The downsizing/rebranding has resulted in two new ‘entities’: the NRC Nanotechnology Research Centre and the NRC-UAlberta [University of Alberta] Nanotechnology Initiative. The original NINT was a joint venture between the Canadian federal government’s NRC and the province of Alberta, which was a co-funder with the institute (now initiative/research centre) itself being located at the University of Alberta. You can see the latest description of these agencies on this NRC Nanotechnology webpage.

For scandal mongers, the date the NRC Nanotechnology webpage was last updated is an interesting one:  March 14, 2018. My first posting about the ‘Montemagno affair’ was on March 5, 2018. Briefly, Carlo Montemagno was a US ressearcher and academic who was enticed to work at the University of Alberta with $100M of federal and provincial funding to be paid out over a 10-year period. His salary when he left about 1/2 way through his term was approximately $500,00 CAD per year. Departing in July/August 2017, Dr. Montemagno who headed up the “ingenuity Lab,” a kind of nanotechnology research and incubator project, moved to the Southern Illinois University (SIU) where he ran into some problems some of which seemed to stretch backwards to his time in Alberta. I did a followup two-part posting (April 26, 201 8 (part 1) after a student reporter from SIU dug up more material. This downsizing/rebranding seems to have been quite the cleanup job. By the way, Canada’s NanoPortal (mentioned in the March 5, 2018 posting) has currently ‘disappeared’.

Finally, the science

There is finally (it has been years) some sort of nanotechnology research from Alberta and the ‘initiative’. From a June 15, 2018 article by Jamie Sarkonak for the Edmonton Herald (in Alberta),

Cellphone breathalyzers may be on the horizon with the breakthrough by an Edmonton-based nanotechnology team.

The special sensors, called nano-optomechanical systems, are normally studied in airtight conditions. But the research of nanotechnologist Wayne Hiebert, published in the journal Science on Friday [June 15, 2018], has found the sensors work better in the open air — making them candidates for everyday use.

Hiebert, a researcher at the Nanotechnology Research Centre [emphasis mine] at the University of Alberta, said this means the sensors may one day run metabolic readings, cancer screenings and other tests that currently have to be done in laboratories. The sensors could also improve GPS and clock accuracy once the technology is more developed, Hiebert said.

Scientists have always believed that sensors on the nanoscale work better when they’re in a space sealed off from any air, Hiebert said. Readings taken in vacuums are much “sharper” than readings taken in regular air, which was always thought to be more useful in nanotechnology.

Four years of Hiebert’s work has found the opposite. The “duller” readings taken in the open gave the scientists a more accurate reading of what was in the air.

For the interested, there are more details in Sarkonak’s article.

For those who can read the science, here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Improving mechanical sensor performance through larger damping by Swapan K. Roy, Vincent T. K. Sauer, Jocelyn N. Westwood-Bachman, Anandram Venkatasubramanian, Wayne K. Hiebert. Science 15 Jun 2018: Vol. 360, Issue 6394, eaar5220 DOI: 10.1126/science.aar5220

This paper is behind a paywall.

Yes! Art, genetic modifications, gene editing, and xenotransplantation at the Vancouver Biennale (Canada)

Patricia Piccinini’s Curious Imaginings Courtesy: Vancouver Biennale [downloaded from http://dailyhive.com/vancouver/vancouver-biennale-unsual-public-art-2018/]

Up to this point, I’ve been a little jealous of the Art/Sci Salon’s (Toronto, Canada) January 2018 workshops for artists and discussions about CRISPR ((clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats))/Cas9 and its social implications. (See my January 10, 2018 posting for more about the events.) Now, it seems Vancouver may be in line for its ‘own’ discussion about CRISPR and the implications of gene editing. The image you saw (above) represents one of the installations being hosted by the 2018 – 2020 edition of the Vancouver Biennale.

While this posting is mostly about the Biennale and Piccinini’s work, there is a ‘science’ subsection featuring the science of CRISPR and xenotransplantation. Getting back to the Biennale and Piccinini: A major public art event since 1988, the Vancouver Biennale has hosted over 91 outdoor sculptures and new media works by more than 78 participating artists from over 25 countries and from 4 continents.

Quickie description of the 2018 – 2020 Vancouver Biennale

The latest edition of the Vancouver Biennale was featured in a June 6, 2018 news item on the Daily Hive (Vancouver),

The Vancouver Biennale will be bringing new —and unusual— works of public art to the city beginning this June.

The theme for this season’s Vancouver Biennale exhibition is “re-IMAGE-n” and it kicks off on June 20 [2018] in Vanier Park with Saudi artist Ajlan Gharem’s Paradise Has Many Gates.

Gharem’s architectural chain-link sculpture resembles a traditional mosque, the piece is meant to challenge the notions of religious orthodoxy and encourages individuals to image a space free of Islamophobia.

Melbourne artist Patricia Piccinini’s Curious Imaginings is expected to be one of the most talked about installations of the exhibit. Her style of “oddly captivating, somewhat grotesque, human-animal hybrid creature” is meant to be shocking and thought-provoking.

Piccinini’s interactive [emphasis mine] experience will “challenge us to explore the social impacts of emerging biotechnology and our ethical limits in an age where genetic engineering and digital technologies are already pushing the boundaries of humanity.”

Piccinini’s work will be displayed in the 105-year-old Patricia Hotel in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood. The 90-day ticketed exhibition [emphasis mine] is scheduled to open this September [2018].

Given that this blog is focused on nanotechnology and other emerging technologies such as CRISPR, I’m focusing on Piccinini’s work and its art/science or sci-art status. This image from the GOMA Gallery where Piccinini’s ‘Curious Affection‘ installation is being shown from March 24 – Aug. 5, 2018 in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia may give you some sense of what one of her installations is like,

Courtesy: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)

I spoke with Serena at the Vancouver Biennale office and asked about the ‘interactive’ aspect of Piccinini’s installation. She suggested the term ‘immersive’ as an alternative. In other words, you won’t be playing with the sculptures or pressing buttons and interacting with computer screens or robots. She also noted that the ticket prices have not been set yet and they are currently developing events focused on the issues raised by the installation. She knew that 2018 is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but I’m not sure how the Biennale folks plan (or don’t plan)  to integrate any recognition of the novle’s impact on the discussions about ‘new’ technologies .They expect Piccinini will visit Vancouver. (Note 1: Piccinini’s work can  also be seen in a group exhibition titled: Frankenstein’s Birthday Party at the Hosfselt Gallery in San Francisco (California, US) from June 23 – August 11, 2018.  Note 2: I featured a number of international events commemorating the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, in my Feb. 26, 2018 posting. Note 3: The term ‘Frankenfoods’ helped to shape the discussion of genetically modified organisms and food supply on this planet. It was a wildly successful campaign for activists affecting legislation in some areas of research. Scientists have not been as enthusiastic about the effects. My January 15, 2009 posting briefly traces a history of the term.)

The 2018 – 2020 Vancouver Biennale and science

A June 7, 2018 Vancouver Biennale news release provides more detail about the current series of exhibitions,

The Biennale is also committed to presenting artwork at the cutting edge of discussion and in keeping with the STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, math[ematics]) approach to integrating the arts and sciences. In August [2018], Colombian/American visual artist Jessica Angel will present her monumental installation Dogethereum Bridge at Hinge Park in Olympic Village. Inspired by blockchain technology, the artwork’s design was created through the integration of scientific algorithms, new developments in technology, and the arts. This installation, which will serve as an immersive space and collaborative hub for artists and technologists, will host a series of activations with blockchain as the inspirational jumping-off point.

In what is expected to become one of North America’s most talked-about exhibitions of the year, Melbourne artist Patricia Piccinini’s Curious Imaginings will see the intersection of art, science, and ethics. For the first time in the Biennale’s fifteen years of creating transformative experiences, and in keeping with the 2018-2020 theme of “re-IMAGE-n,” the Biennale will explore art in unexpected places by exhibiting in unconventional interior spaces.  The hyperrealist “world of oddly captivating, somewhat grotesque, human-animal hybrid creatures” will be the artist’s first exhibit in a non-museum setting, transforming a wing of the 105-year-old Patricia Hotel. Situated in Vancouver’s oldest neighbourbood of Strathcona, Piccinini’s interactive experience will “challenge us to explore the social impacts of emerging bio-technology and our ethical limits in an age where genetic engineering and digital technologies are already pushing the boundaries of humanity.” In this intimate hotel setting located in a neighborhood continually undergoing its own change, Curious Imaginings will empower visitors to personally consider questions posed by the exhibition, including the promises and consequences of genetic research and human interference. …

There are other pieces being presented at the Biennale but my special interest is in the art/sci pieces and, at this point, CRISPR.

Piccinini in more depth

You can find out more about Patricia Piccinini in her biography on the Vancouver Biennale website but I found this Char Larsson April 7, 2018 article for the Independent (UK) more informative (Note: A link has been removed),

Patricia Piccinini’s sculptures are deeply disquieting. Walking through Curious Affection, her new solo exhibition at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art, is akin to entering a science laboratory full of DNA experiments. Made from silicone, fibreglass and even human hair, her sculptures are breathtakingly lifelike, however, we can’t be sure what life they are like. The artist creates an exuberant parallel universe where transgenic experiments flourish and human evolution has given way to genetic engineering and DNA splicing.

Curious Affection is a timely and welcome recognition of Piccinini’s enormous contribution to reaching back to the mid-1990s. Working across a variety of mediums including photography, video and drawing, she is perhaps best known for her hyperreal creations.

As a genre, hyperrealism depends on the skill of the artist to create the illusion of reality. To be truly successful, it must convince the spectator of its realness. Piccinini acknowledges this demand, but with a delightful twist. The excruciating attention to detail deliberately solicits our desire to look, only to generate unease, as her sculptures are imbued with a fascinating otherness. Part human, part animal, the works are uncannily familiar, but also alarmingly “other”.

Inspired by advances in genetically modified pigs to generate replacement organs for humans [also known as xenotransplantation], we are reminded that Piccinini has always been at the forefront of debates concerning the possibilities of science, technology and DNA cloning. She does so, however, with a warm affection and sense of humour, eschewing the hysterical anxiety frequently accompanying these scientific developments.

Beyond the astonishing level of detail achieved by working with silicon and fibreglass, there is an ethics at work here. Piccinini is asking us not to avert our gaze from the other, and in doing so, to develop empathy and understanding through the encounter.

I encourage anyone who’s interested to read Larsson’s entire piece (April 7, 2018 article).

According to her Wikipedia entry, Piccinini works in a variety of media including video, sound, sculpture, and more. She also has her own website.

Gene editing and xenotransplantation

Sarah Zhang’s June 8, 2018 article for The Atlantic provides a peek at the extraordinary degree of interest and competition in the field of gene editing and CRISPR ((clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats))/Cas9 research (Note: A link has been removed),

China Is Genetically Engineering Monkeys With Brain Disorders

Guoping Feng applied to college the first year that Chinese universities reopened after the Cultural Revolution. It was 1977, and more than a decade’s worth of students—5.7 million—sat for the entrance exams. Feng was the only one in his high school to get in. He was assigned—by chance, essentially—to medical school. Like most of his contemporaries with scientific ambitions, he soon set his sights on graduate studies in the United States. “China was really like 30 to 50 years behind,” he says. “There was no way to do cutting-edge research.” So in 1989, he left for Buffalo, New York, where for the first time he saw snow piled several feet high. He completed his Ph.D. in genetics at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Feng is short and slim, with a monk-like placidity and a quick smile, and he now holds an endowed chair in neuroscience at MIT, where he focuses on the genetics of brain disorders. His 45-person lab is part of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, which was established in 2000 with the promise of a $350 million donation, the largest ever received by the university. In short, his lab does not lack for much.

Yet Feng now travels to China several times a year, because there, he can pursue research he has not yet been able to carry out in the United States. [emphasis mine] …

Feng had organized a symposium at SIAT [Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology], and he was not the only scientist who traveled all the way from the United States to attend: He invited several colleagues as symposium speakers, including a fellow MIT neuroscientist interested in tree shrews, a tiny mammal related to primates and native to southern China, and Chinese-born neuroscientists who study addiction at the University of Pittsburgh and SUNY Upstate Medical University. Like Feng, they had left China in the ’80s and ’90s, part of a wave of young scientists in search of better opportunities abroad. Also like Feng, they were back in China to pursue a type of cutting-edge research too expensive and too impractical—and maybe too ethically sensitive—in the United States.

Here’s what precipitated Feng’s work in China, (from Zhang’s article; Note: Links have been removed)

At MIT, Feng’s lab worked on genetically engineering a monkey species called marmosets, which are very small and genuinely bizarre-looking. They are cheaper to keep due to their size, but they are a relatively new lab animal, and they can be difficult to train on lab tasks. For this reason, Feng also wanted to study Shank3 on macaques in China. Scientists have been cataloging the social behavior of macaques for decades, making it an obvious model for studies of disorders like autism that have a strong social component. Macaques are also more closely related to humans than marmosets, making their brains a better stand-in for those of humans.

The process of genetically engineering a macaque is not trivial, even with the advanced tools of CRISPR. Researchers begin by dosing female monkeys with the same hormones used in human in vitro fertilization. They then collect and fertilize the eggs, and inject the resulting embryos with CRISPR proteins using a long, thin glass needle. Monkey embryos are far more sensitive than mice embryos, and can be affected by small changes in the pH of the injection or the concentration of CRISPR proteins. Only some of the embryos will have the desired mutation, and only some will survive once implanted in surrogate mothers. It takes dozens of eggs to get to just one live monkey, so making even a few knockout monkeys required the support of a large breeding colony.

The first Shank3 macaque was born in 2015. Four more soon followed, bringing the total to five.

To visit his research animals, Feng now has to fly 8,000 miles across 12 time zones. It would be a lot more convenient to carry out his macaque research in the United States, of course, but so far, he has not been able to.

He originally inquired about making Shank3 macaques at the New England Primate Research Center, one of eight national primate research centers then funded by the National Institutes of Health in partnership with a local institution (Harvard Medical School, in this case). The center was conveniently located in Southborough, Massachusetts, just 20 miles west of the MIT campus. But in 2013, Harvard decided to shutter the center.

The decision came as a shock to the research community, and it was widely interpreted as a sign of waning interest in primate research in the United States. While the national primate centers have been important hubs of research on HIV, Zika, Ebola, and other diseases, they have also come under intense public scrutiny. Animal-rights groups like the Humane Society of the United States have sent investigators to work undercover in the labs, and the media has reported on monkey deaths in grisly detail. Harvard officially made its decision to close for “financial” reasons. But the announcement also came after the high-profile deaths of four monkeys from improper handling between 2010 and 2012. The deaths sparked a backlash; demonstrators showed up at the gates. The university gave itself two years to wind down their primate work, officially closing the center in 2015.

“They screwed themselves,” Michael Halassa, the MIT neuroscientist who spoke at Feng’s symposium, told me in Shenzhen. Wei-Dong Yao, another one of the speakers, chimed in, noting that just two years later CRISPR has created a new wave of interest in primate research. Yao was one of the researchers at Harvard’s primate center before it closed; he now runs a lab at SUNY Upstate Medical University that uses genetically engineered mouse and human stem cells, and he had come to Shenzhen to talk about restarting his addiction research on primates.

Here’s comes the competition (from Zhang’s article; Note: Links have been removed),

While the U.S. government’s biomedical research budget has been largely flat, both national and local governments in China are eager to raise their international scientific profiles, and they are shoveling money into research. A long-rumored, government-sponsored China Brain Project is supposed to give neuroscience research, and primate models in particular, a big funding boost. Chinese scientists may command larger salaries, too: Thanks to funding from the Shenzhen local government, a new principal investigator returning from overseas can get 3 million yuan—almost half a million U.S. dollars—over his or her first five years. China is even finding success in attracting foreign researchers from top U.S. institutions like Yale.

In the past few years, China has seen a miniature explosion of genetic engineering in monkeys. In Kunming, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, scientists have created monkeys engineered to show signs of Parkinson’s, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, autism, and more. And Feng’s group is not even the only one in China to have created Shank3 monkeys. Another group—a collaboration primarily between researchers at Emory University and scientists in China—has done the same.

Chinese scientists’ enthusiasm for CRISPR also extends to studies of humans, which are moving much more quickly, and in some cases under less oversight, than in the West. The first studies to edit human embryos and first clinical trials for cancer therapies using CRISPR have all happened in China. [emphases mine]

Some ethical issues are also covered (from Zhang’s article),

Parents with severely epileptic children had asked him if it would be possible to study the condition in a monkey. Feng told them what he thought would be technically possible. “But I also said, ‘I’m not sure I want to generate a model like this,’” he recalled. Maybe if there were a drug to control the monkeys’ seizures, he said: “I cannot see them seizure all the time.”

But is it ethical, he continued, to let these babies die without doing anything? Is it ethical to generate thousands or millions of mutant mice for studies of brain disorders, even when you know they will not elucidate much about human conditions?

Primates should only be used if other models do not work, says Feng, and only if a clear path forward is identified. The first step in his work, he says, is to use the Shank3 monkeys to identify the changes the mutations cause in the brain. Then, researchers might use that information to find targets for drugs, which could be tested in the same monkeys. He’s talking with the Oregon National Primate Research Center about carrying out similar work in the United States. ….[Note: I have a three-part series about CRISPR and germline editing* in the US, precipitated by research coming out of Oregon, Part 1, which links to the other parts, is here.]

Zhang’s June 8, 2018 article is excellent and I highly recommend reading it.

I touched on the topic of xenotransplanttaion in a commentary on a book about the science  of the television series, Orphan Black in a January 31,2018 posting (Note: A chimera is what you use to incubate a ‘human’ organ for transplantation or, more accurately, xenotransplantation),

On the subject of chimeras, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) featured a January 26, 2017 article about the pig-human chimeras on its website along with a video,

The end

I am very excited to see Piccinini’s work come to Vancouver. There have been a number of wonderful art and art/science installations and discussions here but this is the first one (I believe) to tackle the emerging gene editing technologies and the issues they raise. (It also fits in rather nicely with the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein which continues to raise issues and stimulate discussion.)

In addition to the ethical issues raised in Zhang’s article, there are some other philosophical questions:

  • what does it mean to be human
  • if we are going to edit genes to create hybrid human/animals, what are they and how do they fit into our current animal/human schema
  • are you still human if you’ve had an organ transplant where the organ was incubated in a pig

There are also going to be legal issues. In addition to any questions about legal status, there are also fights about intellectual property such as the one involving Harvard & MIT’s [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] Broad Institute vs the University of California at Berkeley (March 15, 2017 posting)..

While I’m thrilled about the Piccinini installation, it should be noted the issues raised by other artworks hosted in this version of the Biennale are important. Happily, they have been broached here in Vancouver before and I suspect this will result in more nuanced  ‘conversations’ than are possible when a ‘new’ issue is introduced.

Bravo 2018 – 2020 Vancouver Biennale!

* Germline editing is when your gene editing will affect subsequent generations as opposed to editing out a mutated gene for the lifetime of a single individual.

Art/sci and CRISPR links

This art/science posting may prove of some interest:

The connectedness of living things: an art/sci project in Saskatchewan: evolutionary biology (February 16, 2018)

A selection of my CRISPR posts:

CRISPR and editing the germline in the US (part 1 of 3): In the beginning (August 15, 2017)

NOTE: An introductory CRISPR video describing how CRISPR/Cas9 works was embedded in part1.

Why don’t you CRISPR yourself? (January 25, 2018)

Editing the genome with CRISPR ((clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)-carrying nanoparticles (January 26, 2018)

Immune to CRISPR? (April 10, 2018)